11 Facts About Lanfranco Rasponi

Lanfranco Rasponi was an Italian author, critic, and publicist.

Lanfranco Rasponi is primarily known for his writing on opera and opera singers, especially his 1982 book, The Last Prima Donnas.

Lanfranco Rasponi spent his last years in Rio de Janeiro where he died at the age of 68.

Lanfranco Rasponi was born in Florence, the son of Count Nerino Lanfranco Rasponi Dalle Teste and Caroline Montague, the daughter of a successful businessman in Chattanooga, Tennessee and divided his youth between Italy and the United States.

Lanfranco Rasponi received a BA in English from the University of California Berkeley, which he attended on an exchange scholarship, and then an MA from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1937, after which he began writing articles and reviews for the New York Times and Opera News.

However, they soon fell out and Lanfranco Rasponi opened his own firm, Lanfranco Rasponi Associates.

Lanfranco Rasponi soon added other opera singers, including Renata Tebaldi, Franco Corelli, and Cesare Siepi, as well as the fashionable New York restaurants Quo Vadis and The Colony.

In 1955 Lanfranco Rasponi opened the Sagittarius Gallery in Manhattan as a sideline and travelled to Europe seeking out the work of artists to sell there.

Lanfranco Rasponi closed his public relations firm and left for Italy, never again to work in the United States.

Lanfranco Rasponi then worked on what was to prove his most enduring book, The Last Prima Donnas, a 636-page exposition on 55 great women singers of the past whom he knew and had interviewed during his time New York and later in Europe.

Lanfranco Rasponi never married and was the last of the Rasponi Dalle Teste line.